Charlie Howard’s Descent

Between the bridge and the river he falls through a huge portion of night; it is not as if falling is something new. Over and over he slipped into the gulf between what he knew and how he was known. What others wanted opened like an abyss: the laughing stock-clerks at the grocery, women at the luncheonette amused by his gestures. What could he do, live with one hand tied behind his back? So he began to fall into the star-faced section of night between the trestle and the water because he could not meet a little town’s demands, and his earrings shone and his wrists were as limp as they were. I imagine he took the insults in and made of them a place to live; we learn to use the names because they are there, familiar furniture:faggot was the bed he slept in, hard and white, but simple somehow, queer something sharp but finally useful, a tool, all the jokes a chair, stiff-backed to keep the spine straight, a table, a lamp. And because he’s fallen for twenty-three years, despite whatever awkwardness his flailing arms and legs assume he is beautiful and like any good diver has only an edge of fear he transforms into grace. Or else he is not afraid, and in this way climbs back up the ladder of his fall, out of the river into the arms of the three teenage boys who hurled him from the edge— really boys now, afraid, their fathers’ cars shivering behind them, headlights on—and tells them it’s all right, that he knows they didn’t believe him when he said he couldn’t swim, and blesses his killers in the way that only the dead can afford to forgive.